Saturday, December 08, 2012

“The ship on which Theseus sailed with the youths and
returned in safety, the thirty-oared galley, was preserved by the Athenians
down to the time of Demetrius Phalereus.29 They took away the old timbers from time to time, and put new
and sound ones in their places, so that the vessel became standing illustration
for the philosophers in the mooted question of growth, some declaring that it
remained the same, others that it was not the same vessel.” – Plutarch, the
Life of Theseus

We are like sailors who on the open sea must reconstruct
their ship but are never able to start afresh from the bottom. We are like
sailors who on the open sea must reconstruct their ship but are never able to
start afresh from the bottom. – Otto Neurath

There’s a curious error in Barthes by Barthes – something that
is like a parapraxis, a Freudian slip. Like the classic instance of the
Freudian slip outlined in the Psychopathology of Everyday Life, this one, too, has to do with a classical
allusion.

It is contained in the entry entitled, The Argo.

“ A frequent image: that of the ship, the Argo (bright and
white), which the Argonauts replaced piece by piece, little by little, so that
in the end they had an entirely new vessel, without having to change either its
name or its form.”

This image seems to be a conflation of two classical
instances of the ship image in philosophy. One is the vessel of Theseus, which
is first mentioned by Plutarch in the Life of Theseus. In the early modern
period, Plutarch’s instance was taken up by Hobbes and Leibniz, each of who
commented on the paradox of identity that the ship names. The second is Neurath’s
ship. As Thomas Uebel has shown, Neurath often turned to the image of the
rebuilt but continuous ship in his writing. He especially used the image
against the Carnapian ideal of a meta-language – a dream language in which
syntax and semanticity would merge, so that we would know from the very
construction of a sentence whether it was true or not.This, Neurath thought, fundamentally
misunderstands language. Hence, the image of a ship which is constantly being
repaired from flotsam at sea by sailors who cannot simply go into port and take
the ship apart from the bottom.In Hans
Blumenberg’s exploration of ship metaphors in philosophy, he quotes an instance
where Neurath claims that the imprecise clusters are “always somehow part of
the ship.”

Out of these two separate images, Barthes chose to attach
the perpetually reconstructed ship to the Argo, which carried Jason and his
crew – the Argonauts – to Colchis. In constrast with Theseus’s ship, which –
being on display – is, as it were, a museum piece, the Argo is an object of
practical life. But there is another difference with Theseus’s ship, one that
should block Barthes’ appropriation. As Apollonius of Rhodes put it in the
Argonautica: ‘For a divine timber had been fixed in her: Athene had taken it
from the oak of Dodona and fitted it in the center of the prow.”

The wood of Dodona had the power of human speech – a power
that was given to the Argo. So, in fact, the Argo is the one instance of a ship
in which there is something irreplaceable.Which goes against Barthes point: ‘This vessel, the Argo, is very
useful. It furnishes us with the allegory of an eminently structural object,
created not by genius, inspiration, determination, evolution, but by two modest
acts (which cannot be grasped by the mystique of creation): substitution (one
piece drives out the other, as in a paradigm) and nomination (the name is not
at all tied to the stability of the pieces) by means of combining in the
interior of the same name, nothing is left of the origin. The Argo is an object
without any other cause than its name, without any other identity than its
form.”

As in any parapraxis, we are given an utterance that is like
a wound, allowing us, if we have the tools, to trace the trauma. The trauma
here is seems to be in the form of a forgetting – forgetting the magical/religious
instance. That forgetting marks the enlightenment heritage of structuralism –
in fact, Barthes mistake might be taken as emblematic of the fact that
structuralism was the purest outcome of the enlightenment, its endpoint.
Structuralism assumes, finally, that the world is saturated with substitutes,
is a system of substitutes – in a sense, the world is capitalism. And in this
world, action at a distance, magic, origin, Athene are chased away by a
universal forgetting . Under the guidance of the name – in the name of – the system
of substitutions can act on its own, automatically, without a genius.

In Barthes telling, these two acts just happen to coincide
in this one image. They are, however, historically bound together. In practical
terms, the crew of the Argo is simply trying to survive and stay afloat, which
is why all oak planks – whether from Dodona or from sea wrack – are replaceable.
From the point of view of nomination, however, whether the Argo is registered
as the Argo or not is of ultimate political importance. If the name doesn’t
hold, then the Argo becomes a pirate ship, an illicit ship. And at this point
the schema of substitutions feeds into a different destination for the ship.

The forgetting of the story of the Argo – the supervenience
of two other stories of ships and identity – is all the more freighted as
Barthes himself is in the midst of changing, as he wrote Barthes by Barthes,
from the disenchanted mapper of myths to the softer and more vulnerable utopian
of desire. He was, in a sense, letting one piece of Barthes drive out
another.Right after presenting the
image of the Argo, he personalizes it by contrasting his office in Paris with
his office in the country, which, though differently located, is identical in
function.He ends this passage by
writing of the Argo as the ideal structural object, in which the “system prevails
over particular beings.” But using an image which is structured to deny that
the system prevails over Athena – using an image of the one boat that can talk –
Barthes seems to be undermining his point – just as he is trying to shed his
structuralist past.

Wednesday, December 05, 2012

Adam has been fed and patted on the back and rubbed on the
belly – the ritual of faire le rot. He’s been deposited on his portable foam
bed with the special posture design and
the straps to make sure he doesn’t tumble out. He’s in his red pjs now, and as
he lolls there, stunned by the milk, his legs kicking, he reminds me – absurdly
– of some Cossack general, retiring from the night out at the gypsy camp. It is
the round, nearly bare head. And I proceed to the hushing part of the night,
which usually lasts from 15 to 30 minutes. It is a great exercise in patience,
saying, in various registers and various modulations, hush honey. I intersperse
this with tout va bien, Adam. He likes that. I can watch the effect on his
face. The big eyes get a little glassier, the eyelids droop. But just as I am
congratulating myself, just as he is on the threshold of sleep, he is yanked
out of the trance and begins to cry. He seems to be yanked out of sleep by the
sleep itself. Like digestion, like hunger, like his parents, constantly holding
him and moving him, sleep is a powerful external force. It comes from the
outside.

It makes me wonder what doesn’t come from the outside. Where
is the interiority in my wee little pea?

In an essay on consciousness in Essays in Radical
Empiricism, William James made the radical suggestion that the philosophers and
the rational psychologists have put us on the wrong track with their model of
consciousness. James announces this with the subtlety of a gunslinger clearing
out the saloon:

“I believe that ‘consciousness,’ when once it has evaporated
to this estate of pure diaphaneity, is on the point of disappearing altogether.
It is the name of a nonentity, and has no right to a place among first principles.”

James proposes, instead, that instead of sitting here with
two screens, one outside my body and one inside my mind, there is one screen
that forms something like a point at the intersection of two lines of
experience. James ends his essay with an account that, perhaps, Adam would
agree with:

“Let the case be what it may in others, I am as confident as
I am of anything that, in[Pg
37] myself, the stream of thinking (which I recognize emphatically
as a phenomenon) is only a careless name for what, when scrutinized, reveals
itself to consist chiefly of the stream of my breathing. The ‘I think’ which
Kant said must be able to accompany all my objects, is the ‘I breathe’ which
actually does accompany them. There are other internal facts besides breathing
(intracephalic muscular adjustments, etc., of which I have said a word in my
larger Psychology), and these increase the assets of ‘consciousness,’ so far as
the latter is subject to immediate perception;[24]
but breath, which was ever the original of ‘spirit,’ breath moving outwards,
between the glottis and the nostrils, is, I am persuaded, the essence out of
which philosophers have constructed the entity known to them as consciousness.”

Adam, perhaps, would make the case that it is not the
breath, but the scream. On the first day Adam was born, he was as exhausted as
his parents, and he didn’t make a sound as we all slept, an exhausted pod in
the hospital room. It worried me a bit, because I expected more sound. We got
it the next day.

Now we get it every day. It really isn’t that bad. Myself, I
think he needs to exercise his lungs and tire himself out, sometimes. But other
people in other apartments intrude into one’s consciousness – that glottal stop
and start – and besides, I don’t want Adam to scream too much, because I think that
this might not be good for the poor guy. So the screaming is followed by
holding, the bouncy bouncy, a pickup in the stream of hush honeys.

Still, I’m not satisfied with James’ account. Who is? And I
wonder, walking around holding Adam, about where the interiority is. Is it some
small lost thing in a baby? A peephole in a locked door to a dark room?

Well, that is much too dire an image. I am thinking that it
is more like a bathtub toy. It bobs on the surface, and is swooped down upon and
submerged time and time again, but each time it rises with irresistible force
to the top of the surface again. Of course, the surface does not “obey” the toy.
Later, the toy will get that illusion, and it will be forever after impossible to
disabuse it of that notion, which will go into a whole mythology of
responsibility, of “earning” things, of making, of owning. On the other hand,
the surface can’t drown the toy. It keeps bobbing up.

And so, between happy burbling, sleep, the satisfactions of
sucking, the enormous tragedy of changing diaper and clothes that fills the whole world,
and then abruptly stops, the little toy is, I think, already there. I can feel
it in my hands, it is palpable as we pace, bounce, and Adam goes – with a
protest or two – back to sleep.

Tuesday, December 04, 2012

We worry before the birth about the multitude of things that can happen, Down’s syndrome, the random birth defect like some serial killer, some small malignity hidden in our genes, or something we have perhaps done, some chemical we have absorbed, some toxic event in which we have unwittingly taken part. And then Adam is born and he is perfect. And then it occurs to us that he was safer in the womb than he will ever be again. He’s now in a world of sharp edges, chronic illnesses and conditions, traffic accidents, bad drugs and louche friends, plus he’s male. Male! If not prone himself to violence, and already I’m the parent who believes he can’t be, not my angel, he is as a male statistically prone to be the object picked on by other violent males. Last night, feeding him the bottle, I put my hand under his head, as I have done now a dozen times, and it suddenly struck me how fragile his skull was, how it was a work in progress, how I could feel its soft connections, the cartilaginous mesh that will eventually fuse to make the hard skull, such as the one that I possess. And my hand felt – this thinking hand - as well, how absolutely Adam’s head must be protected.

About Me

MANY YEARS LATER as he faced the firing squad, Roger Gathman was to remember that distant afternoon when his father took him to discover
ice. Or rather, to discover the profit making potential of selling bags of ice to picnicking Atlantans, the most glorious of the old man's Get Rich schemes, the one that devoured the most energy, the one that seemed so rational for a time, the one that, like all the others - the farm, the housebuilding business, the plastic sign business, chimney cleaning, well drilling, candy machine renting - was drawn by an inexorable black hole that opened up between skill and lack of business sense, imagination and macro-economics, to blow a huge hole in the family savings account. But before discovering the ice machine at 12, Roger had discovered many other things - for instance, he had a distinct memory of learning how to tie his shoes. It was in the big colonial, a house in the Syracuse metro area that had been built to sell and that stubbornly wouldn't - hence, the family had moved into it. He remembered bending over the shoes, he remembered that clumsy feeling in his hands - clumsiness, for the first time, had a habitation, it was made up of this obscure machine, the shoe, and it presaged a lifetime of struggle with machine after machine.